There have been growing needs for the quantitative evaluation of cardiac wall motion. Recently, a myocardial motion tracking technique (Wall Motion Tracking) using a pattern matching technique has been commercialized, and used clinically. This technique is, however, dependent on the image quality of ultrasonic images. Using a contrast medium will improve the image quality of a cardiac image. Therefore, a contrast medium may be used in combination with tracking processing.
However, the influence of speckle pattern noise due to a contrast medium will degrade tracking accuracy on the boundary portions between cardiac chambers and cardiac muscle.